Know your site is down before your users do

The simplest question is still the most important one: does your site answer? Pingsured asks it for you — every minute, or as often as every 15 seconds on the Scale plan — from servers in Germany, Finland, the US West Coast and Singapore. When the answer stops coming, you hear about it from us, not from a customer.

What a check does

Each check sends an HTTP request to the address you give it and judges the answer:

the server must answer within the check's timeout;
the status code must be the one you expect — 200 by default, or a list or range such as 200,204 or 200-299;
for an https address, the certificate must be valid for the name; a check fails on an expired or mismatched certificate just as a browser would refuse it.

Redirects are followed, up to 3 by default, so http://example.com is checked through to the page it leads to. A connection that is refused, a name that does not resolve and a request that times out all fail the check, with the reason.

How you are alerted

One failed check is not an outage. The alert threshold — such as "3 of the last 5 checks failed" — is applied per location, so a single slow answer stays quiet and a site that is down from one region is reported even while the others still reach it.

When a ping crosses the threshold, you are alerted by email and in the app, and, on the Team plan and above, by a webhook into your incident tool or chat.

Response time

Every check records how long the answer took, per location: in total, and split into DNS lookup, connection, TLS handshake and time to the first byte. The ping's chart shows the total, or the part you choose, so you can see a site getting slower, not only one that has stopped answering.

Why Pingsured for uptime monitoring

From several places at once. A CDN edge, a DNS change or a routing problem can take a site down for one region only; a check per location shows which.
Judged per location. Thresholds per location keep a single lost request quiet without hiding a regional outage.
More than up or down. The same ping can check the content of the answer, its headers and its certificate — see the other feature pages.
Hosted in the EU. Your list of sites and their results are stored in Germany and Finland, by a German company.

Limits worth knowing

Checks send GET or HEAD and only reach public addresses; a site in a private network cannot be checked.
There is no alert for slow responses yet: response times are charted, and a check fails only when its timeout passes.